A Next Frictional Game Website is online teasing the next game from the developer of Amnesia and other spooky games. It seems this may be connected to their latest survival/horror offering, as it currently sports the Amnesia logo and the tag line "Something is emerging." Presumably we'll learn more soon enough. Thanks Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Ah! I missed this because despite making some of my favorite games in recent years I'm still not all that familiar with their name.

I don't know if it did this at the time of the posting but clicking the image takes you to Boreray island in Scotland. I decided to read what little info Wikipedia has on it and there's nothing really especially interesting. Then I see "Not to be confused with Boreray, St Kilda."

That Boreray island is about 40 miles west from where they originally linked. And that one has druidic stones and altars, smallpox outbreak, marooned sailors, and recent archaeological discoveries as of 2011.

I just hope the enemy encounters in their next game are less scripted than the ones in Amnesia. In Amnesia, enemies became formulaic. When you hear the scary music begin, run to the nearest room, close the door and wait for the music to stop. That's how you deal with almost every enemy encounter.

It would be better to have more dynamic encounters. Maybe get rid of the scary music entirely so that you have no idea when it's safe to come out of hiding.

Prez wrote on Feb 12, 2012, 16:10:It took a while for me to warm to the "First Person Run-and-Hide-r" (reminds me of high school. ), but now I have come to appreciate the brilliance in these games. The atmosphere is exquisite; the dread palpable. There's just no way to do fear properly when you can launch rockets into enemies' faces. The feel of vulnerability is what puts the horror in a horror game.

That's the genius of Amnesia. In order to render the horror truly soul shaking, they rendered the character in the game totally powerless. And that's how it should be. They learned the lesson from Lovecraft really well.

A few things come to mind but the one that might have potential for really spooky stuff would be the lost tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor to unify China. From wiki:

Qin Shi Huang's tomb

One of the first projects the young king accomplished while he was alive was the construction of his own tomb. In 215 BC Qin Shi Huang ordered General Meng Tian with 300,000 men to begin construction.[41] Other sources suggested he ordered 720,000 unpaid laborers to build his tomb to specification.[18] Again, given John Man's observation regarding populations of the time (see paragraph above), these historical estimates are debatable. The main tomb (located at 34°22&#8242;52.75&#8243;N 109°15&#8242;13.06&#8243;E

) containing the emperor has yet to be opened and there is evidence suggesting that it remains relatively intact.[57] Sima Qian's description of the tomb includes replicas of palaces and scenic towers, "rare utensils and wonderful objects", 100 rivers made with mercury, representations of "the heavenly bodies", and crossbows rigged to shoot anyone who tried to break in.[58] The tomb was built on Li Mountain, which is only 30 kilometers away from Xi'an. Modern archaeologists have located the tomb, and have inserted probes deep into it. The probes revealed abnormally high quantities of mercury, some 100 times the naturally occurring rate, suggesting that some parts of the legend are credible.[51] Secrets were maintained, as most of the workmen who built the tomb were killed.[51][59]

It took a while for me to warm to the "First Person Run-and-Hide-r" (reminds me of high school. ), but now I have come to appreciate the brilliance in these games. The atmosphere is exquisite; the dread palpable. There's just no way to do fear properly when you can launch rockets into enemies' faces. The feel of vulnerability is what puts the horror in a horror game.

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” - Mahatma Gandhi

jacobvandy wrote on Feb 11, 2012, 16:04:I still haven't found the courage to play through the Dark Descent... I did the expansion for the Potato Sack objective last spring, and that was bad enough even knowing exactly what to do!

I watched a playthrough so I knew what to do, still, that was the hardest my heart beat for a game.

I play with surround sound (7.1), so that last part where you have to turn those wheels to open/close the doors in the water was very nerve-wrecking. After getting that door shut and running but hearing the monster break through the boxes behind me as I jumped over them about made my heart pound out of my chest.

I need to grow a pair and finally get through the water area in Dark Descent.

I've really come to like this developer and their style of games. The Penumbra series is an FPS puzzle solving type game with a somewhat Half-Life-esque to it, but Amnesia I have to dive into, as I just picked it up of Amazon for $18.50....